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The Festival By The Sea

The festival by the sea graced us last week—but it didn’t exactly follow the planned schedule of glitz and yachts and the Snapchat Ferris wheel.

Instead, we saw a breaking point among publishers and advertisers fed up with ad tech’s slow approach to clean up fraud, set industry standards, and guarantee brand safety.

The discontent runs so deep that Index Exchange’s CEO predicted a “seismic shift” in digital marketing and called on ad tech to “take responsibility” in a kick-off column to Cannes.

He wasn’t alone. Throughout the week, other major advertisers and publishers spoke frankly about ad tech. Here are some sound bites:

“The media supply chain is so murky and non-transparent, and so wasteful and even fraudulent – we’re wasting huge amounts of money.” – P&G’s Marc Pritchard

“The world of digital advertising is a nightmarish joke… There are all sorts of creepy, borderline fraudulent middlemen, this thicket of strange companies, tracking pixels on everything. You couldn’t think of a more dangerous environment for a brand.” – The New York Times’s Mark Thompson

“The cheapest media is on the lousy sites. You get what you pay for. If it’s too good to be true it probably is.” – Unilever’s Keith Weed

“But in this age, utterly dominated by content distributors - the duopoly - at the expense of content creators - news organizations like ours - it is fair to say that the World Wide Web has not evolved in the manner that most civilised individuals had hoped, say, 15 years ago.” – News Corp’s Robert Thomson

I don’t know about you, but I’d be sweating if the world’s largest advertisers and publishers were speaking like that about my company.

Ad tech players should consider this a formal warning to clean up their act or move aside. Publishers and advertisers are united on what the future of advertising should be, and companies that can provide brand safe environments, third-party verification, and viewability assurances are already two steps ahead of the duopoly.

AdTech News And Editorial

Even as ad tech players gear up to yet again take over Yacht Row at the Cannes ad festival and anticipate talking shop over glasses of rosé, they need to recognize the tone is going to be very different than when they first stepped onto the French Riviera.

It's never a surprise to hear a high-end digital publisher lampoon the chaotic digital ad environment, but a sharp invective delivered by Mark Thompson, CEO of The New York Times, went beyond the usual sniping.

Ads.txt could be a simple solution to a messy problem, giving publishers control of inventory and advertisers confidence in results. But its simplicity might also be its downfall, as it provides unprecedented transparency into an industry that relies on confusing processes and bloated supply chains.

Time Warner will invest $100 million in producing TV-like shows and advertising on Snap Inc.'s Shapchat over the next two years, in a push by the the media giant to reach young audiences on the social network, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Programmatic

Procter & Gamble chief brand officer Marc Pritchard said at the beginning of 2017 that the digital ad industry needed to grow up and follow common measurement standards. Halfway through the year, Pritchard said nearly “40 to 50 percent” of P&G’s media, agency and ad tech partners are meeting the brand’s minimum standards.

Marketers need to shoulder more of the responsibility for the brand safety crisis that has engulfed the industry this year instead of pinning all the blame on Google, according to the CMO of the world’s second largest advertiser.

The algorithmic alchemy of the biggest tech companies is redefining our commercial and social experiences, but like the alchemists of old, algorithms are also a charlatan’s charter, allowing claims of pure science when human intervention is clearly doctoring results to suit either commercial imperatives or political agendas.

Most ad tech conferences these days feature at least one presentation on how blockchain will revolutionize programmatic buying, but blockchain must overcome a lot of hurdles before it can help ad tech with its transparency issues.

Podcasting

Audio ads aren’t created equal, and marketers shouldn’t write podcast ads as they would radio ads. Podcasts require interesting storytelling, a deep understanding of the target audience, and familiarity with the podcast the ad will appear on.

NPR is monetizing the space with ad sales and strategic branded content partnerships. But what’s more interesting is that the organization wants to change how podcast advertising is sold by getting better data in front of brand marketers.

To arm its network of agencies with more data and analytic tools, Omnicom-owned Annalect is launching an internal chatbot called Annalect Utility Bot Interface (or AUBI) that spits out deep troves of data faster than the agency’s team of data scientists can handle.